Ralston, Shapiro given Excellence in Teaching Awards

Excellence in Teaching Awards are presented each year to graduate teaching assistants who show outstanding promise as univeristy-level teachers. Each recipient receives $2,000.

Pamela Ralston
Teaching Assistant in Comparative Literature (UW Seattle)

Ralston

Outside the classroom Pamela Ralston prepares meticulous syllabi for her courses. She sets clear course goals and then develops sequences of writing assignments to steadily draw students deeper into the literature they’re reading. Inside the classroom, she excels at drawing students into energetic and challenging discussions.

Teaching assistants in comparative literature often teach in a number of different departments. So in the past six years Ralston has taken assignments not only in Comparative Literature but also in English, American Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies (not to mention a college prep course in the UW Upward Bound program).

In all these courses, Ralston teaches the skills every student needs: how to read analytically and how to write effectively. Her approach is grounded in “equity pedagogy,” where student knowledge and participation is an active element in the teaching that occurs.

Discovery fuels the process. Ralston helps students understand what a given work of literature has to say to its readers, and she helps them discover that they have something to say in response.

When feelings run strong—as they often do with material that explores cultural, racial, and ethnic experiences—Ralston is a skilled discussion leader. She sets a high standard for respectful, spirited and thoughtful discourse, and she holds students accountable for maintaining those standards.

Her expectations for written work are equally high. Students write regularly and often in Ralston’s classes. And she builds revision—the opportunity for students to reconsider, to improve and to refine their writing—into the syllabus.

David Shapiro
Teaching Assistant in Philosophy (UW Seattle)

Shapiro

In his teaching and by personal example, David Shapiro contradicts the notion that philosophy lives only in the ivory tower. Helping students see how philosophy applies to real life is one of his primary goals in the classroom.

Shapiro has used the state voter’s pamphlet as a focal text in autumn quarter sessions of Philosophy 102 (Contemporary Moral Problems). Building the course around controversial ballot measures, such as abortion, drug legalization and euthanasia, lends immediacy to classroom discussions, with the added social benefit of creating informed voters who are more eager to express their beliefs through the electoral process.

Another strategy: classroom exercises, structured as quiz games and team competitions, that ask students to apply classic and contemporary theories from philosophers—such as Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, and Rene Descartes—to examples in their own lives.

Perhaps Shapiro’s most satisfying innovation, to both teacher and students, is the incorporation of service learning into philosophy and ethics courses. Students volunteer at community organizations to see first hand some real-world embodiments of theoretical issues such as social justice and welfare, poverty, environmental stewardship. The lessons are compelling: More than half the students continue their volunteer work after the course is over.

As education director of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, Shapiro himself regularly volunteers in Seattle public schools, engaging elementary and middle school students in philosophical discussions. Bringing philosophy into the lives of children seems a natural extension of his work in the university classroom. ¶